Well, it’s that time of the year once more. The time when someone starts planning for the Users Conference, having received an acceptance notice of a session proposal. This year it came earlier than usual, because the CfP was started one month earlier, and thus we have a list of tutorials ready before Christmas.

So, let me do some advertising.
I am going to co-present a full day tutorial with Jan Kneschke. MySQL Proxy, the complete tutorial which will cover all about MySQL Proxy, and it will guide users to the creation of Lua scripts. When I proposed it, Jay asked me and Jan if we have enough material to cover 6 hours. After having been in three presentations on this subject, I’d rather ask myself if I can manage to cover all we know (and all that Jan’s volcanic production is adding) in just 6 hours. We will manage, I guess. I have a large collection of Proxy applications, and Jan has quite a few in his drawers. This tutorial will not leave people dissatisfied, I am sure.
Then I am going to have my fun session on the Proxy. The Tutorial will be serious business, and I and Jan will work hard to deliver educational content. Then, toward the end of the conference, I will have this MySQL Proxy Wizardry where I will show how you can do wildly unexpected things with a database server + proxy combination.
Need more reasons? REGISTER!, so you can save quite a few bucks and make sure to get a seat for this tutorial.

On December 13 (it means today for most of the readers) at 15:00 CET (14:00 UTC), the MySQL University lecture on Lua will start.
The topic is quite extensive. Even though the lecture is limited to using Lua with MySQL Proxy, yet there is a lot of ground to cover. During a rehearsal session last week, I realized that the whole matter would need much more than one hour if I describe in detail all the introductory material that I originally planned.
So I will reduce the time dedicated to MySQL Proxy architecture, which you can look on your own by reading Getting started with MySQL Proxy. I will cover this matter only briefly during the lecture, so if you know some background, you’ll enjoy the lecture even more.

If you are new to MySQL University lessons, please read the Instructions for attendees and get ready a few minutes before the allotted time.
The slides and the examples are available on the lecture wiki page.

While researching partitioning performance (expect an article about this topic soon) I come across the news that the Falcon team has released a Falcon Feature Preview with the latest implementation.
The test I was running was based on 9 server instances , using different combinations of MyISAM, InnoDB, and Archive, with and without partitions.
Since I was at it, I quickly added three instances of MySQL 6.0.4 with Falcon (MySQL Sandbox is really handy in these cases) and added Falcon to the test bench.
As I expected, partitioned Falcon is not particularly impressive, but there was a serendipitous result. In addition to large data warehouse oriented queries, the test fires also 180 OLTP queries, with warm indexes, i.e. after the indexes have been cached in memory thanks to previous queries. The warm queries look like the following:

  SELECT * FROM flightstats
  WHERE AirlineID = '19386'
  AND UniqueCarrier = 'NW' AND Carrier = 'NW'
  AND FlightDate = '2002-10-01' AND FlightNum = '1017'
  AND DepTime = '2002-10-01 06:03:00'
  AND Origin = 'EWR' AND Dest = 'DTW'
  -- (all WHERE conditions belong to the PK)

Well, in these queries, Falcon outshines both MyISAM and InnoDB, as shown by the average times.

+----------+----------+----------+----------+
| count(*) | falcon   | myisam   | innodb   |
+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|      180 | 0.000254 | 0.002847 | 0.000302 |
+----------+----------+----------+----------+

Out of 180 OLTP queries, falcon was faster than MyISAM 143 times, and faster than InnoDB 176 times. The table holds 17 million recs (2 GB)

This is not a complete test. Just a result that I got by chance, but it’s nice to see that Falcon is advancing towards its maturity.